Stepping Razor in Orbit: Postmodern Identity and Political Alternatives in William Gibson's Neuromancer

Abstract

uch has been written about how cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer allows new forms of identity. Within that cyberspace, the self can be called into question, decentered, split apart, and rendered unknowable. Brian McHale, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Veronica Hollinger, Scott Bukatman, and John Christie, to name a few critics, have all argued that in some fashion Gibson’s cyberspace represents identity as postmodern.1 In Neuromancer, the new forms of identity point not so much to where we are headed in the future as to where we are in our present condition. The novel is social commentary for contemporary Western society, extrapolating the trajectory of our social practices in the latter years of the twentieth century. The novel illustrates how technology and global capitalism influence our ontology by generating a world of images that have no original referent: meaning is cut loose from our surroundings, so that the self and the world we knew are in question.2 This questioning of ontology in Neuromancer, the representative text for the cyberpunk genre, has caused concern because of its political ramifications. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. finds cyberpunk to be the apotheosis of postmodernism as selfconscious bad faith: he argues that cyberpunk concerns itself not with hopes and solutions but with the difficulties of representation in a hyperreal setting (“Cyberpunk” 193). Along with Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., many have criticized cyberpunk or Neuromancer for a lack of positive alternatives to an impending, dystopic future.3 What has generally been overlooked in Neuromancer is an enclave of political resistance found in the Zion cluster, the home of the Rastas Aerol and Maelcum. Tom Moylan has pointed out its role as a seemingly utopian alternative that might shift the novel’s focus from a dystopian pessimism to a utopian M